Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I remain confident of this:
    I will see the goodness of the Lord
    in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
    be strong and take heart
    and wait for the Lord.

• Psalm 27:13-14

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

• Mark 9:35

To explain the verses, Psalm 27:14 is the verse my wife quoted most often, but when you add Psalm 27:13 and Mark 9:35, you get the essence of the woman I married.

At the end of the last episode, we had arrived in Germany to see that Elvis had died about the time we were at Graceland.  I was met by a captain and a sergeant, random people who volunteered.  The captain lived in the stairwell next to ours.  He was not my company commander, but he might have pulled the short straw.  I think the sergeant just wanted an excuse to go to Frankfurt am Main for some personal reason.

Our flight arrived in the early dewy hours of the morning, but our bodies said that it was near midnight, and our son had not slept a wink.  With turbulence over the Atlantic, we were being served the evening meal about the time the captain got on the intercom to say that if it were daylight and there was no thick fog, we’d be able to see Ireland out the left side windows of the aircraft.  We almost did not have enough time to eat with the flight attendants gathering the remnants of the meal before we started preparing to land in Frankfurt.  Note: I mentioned Frankfurt am Main earlier.  There are several Frankfurts in Germany, but the one on the Main River was the financial center of the country when we were there.

Getting Settled and a Dog Kennel

We had two weeks of orientation before I signed in as the platoon leader of second platoon, Charlie Company, 249 Combat Engineering Battalion (Heavy).

Thinking of my battalion, many years later I saw a documentary for the first Gulf War.  One of the most often used video clips is of Abrams tanks roaring through a cut in the berm that the Iraqis had built to protect them from an invasion from Saudi Arabia.  The last time I ever saw that clip, I finally noticed the sign next to the road.  It had an old-style Peugeot symbol on it, and the words (not an exact quote): “Welcome to Iraq. Road cleared by the 249th Combat Engineering Battalion.”  It probably mentioned which company, but the point was, before Gen. Arnold Schwarzkopf started his famous “end run,” the engineering battalion that I had been assigned to had already been in Iraq for a while.  And some people wonder why they classify the engineers as a combat branch.  And if that had been twelve years earlier, that would have been me clearing the minefield so that the earthmovers could start cutting a hole in the berm and building a road.  But I had been out of the military for about ten years by then – still gives reason to be proud of the unit I served with.

But back to the biography.  By the beginning of the second week in country, we got word that our car was in Bremerhaven.  Someone at the group level (before we became the 18^th Engineering Brigade), arranged for us to take a train to Frankfurt and then switch to a sleeper car reserved for the US military that would take us to Bremerhaven by dawn on Friday, but first we had to take two days of Defensive Driving School and then pass our driving test.

The two had nothing to do with each other.  The Defensive Driving School is often mandated in the US when someone loses their driver’s license due to driving under the influence or too many traffic violations.  Basically, the same thing as driver’s education in high school.  With the dangers on the German highways, everyone had to take the course.  But to pass the driving test, we had a sheet of German road signs, 100 of them.  And we had a sheet of possible meanings of those road signs.  It was a matching question, but I had never had one hundred things to match before.  I flip flopped two of them, and my wife shuffled about five, but we both passed.  Then we went next door and we had to take a reaction time test.  We placed our foot on a fake accelerator pedal.  The light turned green and the computer measured how long it took to transfer your foot to the brake pedal when the light turned yellow.  In Germany, if you run a Yellow Light, you have broken the law, and going an inch past the white line that marks where the intersection starts is also a violation.  We both passed and my wife had better reaction time than I did.

But we had a child who was barely a year old, one year, one month and about 15 days, give or take a few.

My wife was the master at making friends, and within a day or two, she had people willing to babysit while we were in class together or taking the driver’s test.  Really, even if you were a crusty old meanie, the neighbors were really neighbors in Germany.  We were told when we came back to the States that our neighbors in family housing would be total strangers.  In Germany, if the Russians attacked, everyone in the family had to be ready and you had to rely on neighbors.

But the first day when we arrived, we found our apartment was on the fourth floor, a walk up, no elevator.  When we got into the apartment, we found a two-bedroom apartment.  There was a full-sized bed in one room and a twin-sized mattress in the other room – no baby bed.  The first call the next Monday was to the family care and health and recreation officer.  They were simply out of them, but our advanced shipment that included our baby bed was delayed, on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic, at least they thought it was.

We placed as many pillows as we could find around the twin mattress and by the time the baby bed arrived a month or more later, our son had learned how to stay on the mattress, but getting so many bruises by hitting the hardwood floors that he looked like a battered child.

But before we settled in, we had to buy groceries.  The commissary was a few blocks away, and we did not have a car.  A couple of times, my wife’s new friends carpooled to get groceries, but we went to a German department store to buy a suitcase that was the size and shape of a single brown paper grocery bag, if you are old enough to remember those.  The suitcase was in a frame with four-inch wheels.  While I was off taking other classes, my wife would walk those blocks, sometimes two or three times a day, with the suitcase pulled in one arm and the stroller pushed by the other.  After all, we had a pantry to fill, a refrigerator to fill, and three hungry mouths to fill each day.

At the end of our first week, I hopped on a helicopter to fly to Miesau, my first assignment.  While first platoon had the dog kennel, my platoon had the veterinary hospital and the grounds for the kennel, including the exercise yard.

The battalion commander and I flew up because he wanted to check out the project.  It was running low on budget and they were far from finished.  I got to meet the other platoon leader.  The executive officer had been the platoon leader before me, and he left my platoon sergeant in charge.  When we arrived, I was introduced to my sergeant, a tall Texan, well over six feet, and at the moment, he had a piece of one-inch pipe in his hands, fire in his eyes, and he greeted the LTC and me with “Just a few seconds with private ### and the platoon, the Army, and the WORLD will be a better place!”

A year and a half later, I would consider my platoon sergeant to be the single best person who made me into an Army officer, and he was from that moment on one of the best friends I ever had.  And at that same moment, a year and a half later, I agreed with his assessment of private ### that the platoon, the Army, and, indeed, the WORLD would have been a better place without private ###, but that just was not the way to do it.  I am the emotional one, but with my platoon sergeant, I had to calm him down.  I had to learn an entirely new skill set, and quickly.

In the meantime, my wife had been in Germany less than a week.  It was her first day without me nearby, and her hair started falling out.  Of an Army officer, his wife, and a one-year-old who fell out of the bed onto a hardwood floor…  Did I mention that it was a hardwood floor?  Parquet design, glued to a slab of concrete.  HARD!  Of those three, which one should have been the first to the dispensary for medical attention?  It was my wife, she saw every doctor in the dispensary and none could figure out why her hair was falling out.  Then a French doctor came in on contract and he saw my wife for a few seconds.  He started to laugh.  He said that she had alopecia areata.  My wife pronounced it with an “R” after the “P”.  He said that she must be a European.  She was shocked that he got it right, at least half right as she was Eurasian.  He told her to be like the American women and simply not worry about anything.  But no, her European brain thought of various consequences.  Be like the American wives here.  Be empty-headed!!!  Sorry if that offends, but then again, it was the doctor saying this, and the doctor was a brutally honest and opinionated Frenchman, working for the Americans in Germany.  He did not care if he offended anyone.

If you look up this disorder, often the hair falls out in clumps. It looked like perfectly round spots, about the diameter of a golf ball.  The first couple were difficult to hide, but as more appeared, she got a perm and dyed her hair, and I think painting the bald spots.

While the “empty-headed” enjoyed the ability to be in Germany and see new things, she saw the Cold War as a threat.  She had never been anywhere when there was an ocean between her and her family and family was important.  In her mind, the three of us were not family yet.  Family was in Texas with the security of Mom and Dad and eight siblings.

When the hair eventually grew back, not completely, it was snow white.  That started her in dying her hair even more, but eventually she saw that the roots were no longer white.  But this took a couple of years, getting used to being away from family, and starting to realize that we were now family.

But then, it got worse when I moved to Miesau and took our only car Monday through Friday.  But that was after the trip to get the car.

Someone else had made the reservations, but when the three of us arrived in Frankfurt am Main rail station (Bahnhof), the sleeper cars were locked with no attendant to let us in.  We checked the train schedule and made it to Bremerhaven on a different train entirely.  But just like flying to Germany, no sleep that night.

Our bus was waiting for us.  That part was okay.  We arrived and stood in line.  One of millions of lines in the military.  There are lines for you to wait to get to lines for you to wait more, just to have more lines.

We should have had no trouble, but the specialist 4 in front of me was told that he had to sign for a German Ford.  The Spec 4 insisted they had switched cars with him.  He would not drive a Ford on a dare.  He had a Mercury Opal.  As the argument got louder and louder, I started laughing.  The naval petty officer yelled at me, “Lieutenant, what is so funny?!?!”  I said that I had only been in Germany for only two weeks, but I was wondering why all these Germans were driving Mercury Opals that said “FORD” on the back.  The naval petty officer turned to the Spec 4 and said, “Listen to the Lieutenant! Sign Here or I’ll ship your (expletive deleted) German Ford back to the States where it can magically turn into a Mercury Opal again.”  The Spec 4 growled at both of us, but suddenly the line was moving.

In the two weeks, I had learned German road signs and gotten a map of western Europe, a map in magazine form, but I had not learned Dutch road signs and my wife wanted to spend the night in southern Holland at her aunt’s home.  I had to ask my wife what “uit” meant.  I pronounced it “ooo-it.”  She huffed, “You mean ‘out?’”  I replied, “never mind.”  Some of the language was similar, but it could get you into trouble.  My wife already knew that.  The laundry room was in the basement at our apartment building, and when she went there the first time, there were German workers fixing a washing machine.  She said something in Dutch that she thought would translate the same, but they got red in the face with embarrassment before they realized she was Dutch and was not propositioning them.

The worst part of that day after getting the car was that I was driving with no sleep in over 36 hours.  We arrived, by God’s Grace.  My wife’s cousin was fun to be around.  She knew English, but the small amount of English that anyone else spoke was limited.  But the next day, we had a longer drive, all the way home.  At the backwoods border crossing that we always crossed over the three years, a couple of times each year, the border crossing agents never asked for any identification.  After the first time, they recognized us and knew we were going to see family.

Once home, we had a car, but I had to use it to get to a town beyond Ramstein Air Force Base, about two hours away.  At first, I used the Autobahn, but as I got more comfortable, I started taking shortcuts down the back roads and got to experience rural German life.  In the meantime, my wife was inviting neighbors up to the fourth floor for coffee.  Coffee was a cheap price to keep her from going crazy.  I would be building a veterinary hospital for another three months and only being home for the weekend.

Even the weekend was not our own.  We had a choice.  We could go to the big church about half the way between our apartment and the Commissary, or we could go where the troops in my platoon were, the Gerszewski Kaserne, and their Chapel.  We went to the chapel at Gerszewski although rarely did I ever see one of my platoon members come to church.  But our pastor was from Memphis, Tennessee, so we hit it off.  My wife and I joined the choir.  Only one problem, the choir director was the LTC’s wife, my battalion commander’s wife.  She was there for the same reason we were, but in some strange way, she reminded my wife of the LTC in the Air Force who had abused her, too bossy, too demanding, and she had her favorites and everyone else had to pick up the slack.  But, it was only for an hour each Sunday while we practiced the anthem, right?  No, there was social protocol, and they would bump into each other often, and my wife, having been formerly enlisted in the Air Force was expected to be understanding of these young wet nosed officer’s wives.  And I might have been able to help, but in those days, my wife never talked about her time in the military, and I only know a little about the abuse.  I knew none of it until years later.

My wife’s hair was already falling out and now more stress.

My Next Three Construction Jobs, all at the Home base

The stress of me being gone all week was over after three months.  I had two quick construction jobs in the area.  The first was an oil catch basin just a hundred yards from the barracks.  The next was putting up fences for baseball diamonds all over the community, for the adults and the children.

While you would think that the stress level came down for my wife, it went up for me.  Soldiers that enjoyed the TDY pay (per diem) felt they got a pay cut when they were sleeping in their own bed at night and working somewhere that they could walk to work.  Morale became poor, which made me nervous.

When we had our first wargames to participate in, my wife knew we were gone for two weeks, and she went to northern Holland to visit her father’s family.  When I came home, she talked about having ridden in an aunt’s little car on the bike path.  Her elderly aunt had no idea she was not on the highway.  There were many angry cyclists that day.

The next training exercise allowed my wife to go back to her mother’s family in southern Holland and do an adequate visit.  All this time, she rode the rails.  She became an expert with rail schedules.  She often was riding on the train through the historic Rhein River valley with castles on either side of the river.  She knew that a cousin lived in one of the castles, but due to the Nazi connections, and their disowning him for marrying a Eurasian woman, my father-in-law refused to reconcile with his aunts, uncles, and cousins.  We never got to see the Rhein from a castle on the hill.

By this point, she dressed like a German and dressed our son like a German.  We had both attended a week-long conversational German short course, designed to help us with numbers, and where the toilet was and the train station.  Our graduation was eating a meal in a restaurant without speaking English.  My wife then signed up for a college course in German.  She was a pro, but she kept her mouth shut.  As some arrogant college students were in her rail cabin, they mocked the tour guide talking about the famous hill, the Lorelei, where the river currents in a huge bend in the river would cause ships to crash, not having anything to do with the legend of a siren singer atop the hill that would distract the ship captains.  The college kids laughed about the stupid American tourists, but my wife simply took it all in and they never suspected she was an American.  She liked her anonymity on such trips.

She only drove once, to southern Holland.  She told me that on the way home she was driving about 120miles per hour (nearly 200kph) on the autobahn and the vibrations in our tiny car stopped.  I did not tell her that was because she did not have any wheels touching the ground.  I just said for her to drive under 100mph and deal with the vibrations.  She gave me a strange inquisitive face and I just smiled, but she slowed down.  Really, she rarely drove that route after that time, taking the train exclusively.

By this point, it was Spring, I had been selected for NATO wargames and given a NATO Cosmic clearance.  That also meant I had to do some “missions” along the way.  My wife hated those.  She could not leave home since she had no idea how long I was gone.  No one would tell her anything about where I was or what I was doing.  Frankly, they did not know either, except for the one who assigned me the task.  And it was mostly information gathering that an engineer would be skilled at obtaining.  Beyond that, I say nothing although it was probably declassified decades ago.  But my wife never knew that I was NOT in mortal danger, and she had an imagination.

A split Platoon

The next Spring, we settled into two construction projects.  My platoon sergeant went with the company executive officer and about two hundred engineering soldiers to build a special thing that was classified.

I became the executive officer of the company, but I was still the platoon leader of my platoon.  Then the new company commander made me the acting company commander, permanently, so that he could hide and I could run things.

It kept me home except for a couple of flights in a helicopter to visit the “other site.”  And in one of those, I crash landed, but that is a story I have written about before.  But as the XO, I had soldiers at the Belgian embassy and half my platoon was renovating a gymnasium (USA gymnasium, not a school, where you play basketball and work out with weights).  My son even went to the gymnasium one day when my wife had a doctor’s appointment.  I bought him a Tonka truck hardhat so that he fit in.

At this point, my stress level was getting high. I had no idea that a bleeding ulcer and GERD for the rest of my life would face me by year’s end.  My wife demanded that we travel and see our surroundings, but with the demands of having three full time jobs, we were restricted to the weekends.

That summer, I hosted a West Point cadet and my wife’s youngest sister came to visit.  They dated a couple of times, but it was her high school graduation gift to visit her big sister’s apartment in Germany.  They did a lot of travelling.

More Trouble with the LTC’s Wife

In the meantime, I was invited to audition for a song and dance troupe that was used to improve soldier morale, the Sophisticated Ladies and Friends.  I became the comic relief, one of the friends.  But while I was singing Indian Love Call with a tall blonde, my wife was not allowed to audition.  Somehow, the LTC’s wife thought my wife’s superior first soprano voice was not required because she had lesser skilled sopranos who needed their confidence built up.  Little did the LTC’s wife know that my wife had undiagnosed PTSD from an abusive female LTC in the Air Force and she needed her confidence boosted.  The rift nearly came to the boiling point when I was assigned to host the hail and farewell to say farewell to the LTC.

After working up close and personal with the LTC’s wife to make the social gathering work out, the two of them were gone.  The new LTC was married to a woman who shunned the spotlight.  I only remember meeting her once.

My wife calmed down, and we continued to take trips on weekends and occasional day trips during the week, including a jaunt into Switzerland where we went to some of the lakes in the northeastern part of Switzerland and we went to the Rhein Falls.  But we loved driving the Wein Strasse and doing some wine tasting and going beyond there to Trier and the Roman Aqueducts.  We explored the Black Forest and we loved going to baroque gardens wherever we could find them, our favorite was a palace near Heidelberg, but our son liked a fairy tale garden north of Stuttgart.

The pastor at the chapel invited my wife and I to go to a conference in Berchtesgaden.  We got to take in Munich as well.

And my wife reunited with an old friend

About this time, we would take weekend trips into Bavaria to visit a Physics teacher.  He had been a young rocket technician in the German military.  They sent him to Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX.  He somehow found out that my wife’s father could speak his native German and he and his wife became friends with my wife’s family.  Now, out of the military and completing college, he taught Physics at a local high school.

They came a couple of times to Karlsruhe, including to my promotion party to captain.  But that will be in the next episode.

Our last time with them was after we had our second son and they wanted us to experience a German Christmas.

But about this time, my wife got pregnant with our second son.  I had my fourth local construction project and I left the platoon.  My platoon sergeant left also.  Throughout this time with my platoon, my wife wanted to get to know the people I talked about when I got home.  We had several of them over for a meal.  Some loved it.  Others were afraid of “normalcy” having escaped civilian life for something more structured, and having dinner with family was frightening to them.  Oddly, when I left the room, the frightened ones opened up to my wife and they were able to relax.

My wife even opened our doors to other choir members at the chapel, just not the LTC’s wife.

And what is next?

When I left the battalion for the Facilities Engineer job, my wife felt like we were back in civilian life and things got better.  More of that in the next episode.

And to all this, I give praise and honor to God.  Only He knew that the two of us would one day marry each other, and it would truly be until death did we part.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.